Birds of prey

Joseph Meyer, founder of Flying J, entered the helicopter industry after he earned his A&P certificate.

“I was still working off and on in the oil fields. And a friend of mine told me about a guy that did this type of work named JC Short,” he says. “And he needed somebody to help work on his machines on the weekend.”

One day, Short invited Meyer to join him on a wildlife catch, where a left-seater shoots a net or tranquilizer out of a helicopter to capture native or exotic animals.

“And I went and watched him do it. And I’m like, I want to do that.”

With that goal in mind, he built his time, trading weekend maintenance for flight training, and after five years he earned his certificate. Meyer decided to branch out to his own business, Flying J Services, in November 2003 from the family garage. At one point he was managing maintenance for around 30 Robinsons, all while building his flight time in the background, with the goal to transition to full-time flying. The relationships he built via maintenance helped make that happen.

“They would throw me a bone every now and then and go, ‘Hey, cool, cover this job for me.’ And I slowly started picking up work and building experience flying.”

Things started to “really pick up” around 2012, and Meyer now has around 12,000 (or more) hours. Flying J stays busy with game capture, brush spraying, crop spraying, deer surveys, hog and coyote eradication, cattle work, and more, moving away from full-time maintenance, although Meyer notes that he’s always willing to help a fellow aviator out in a bind.

With the company and demand growing, his middle son, Justin, decided he wanted to learn to fly about eight years ago at age 20.

“The first five years I wanted to kill him,” Meyer says. “They grow up after a while, and they figure out that, ‘Hey, Dad wasn’t as stupid as I thought he was.’” Justin now does more than half the flying.

Joseph’s youngest son, Jacob, also works for the family business doing groundwork. Behind it all is Joseph’s wife, Monica, who takes care of the books, permits, logistics, and field provisioning for long days, such as a recent week where a bigger than normal team captured 600 deer on one ranch over five days.

While the services Flying J offers are broad, it’s the animal capture that remains Meyer’s favorite, and we’re here in the heart of deer season. Flying J is one part of wider deer management programs (DMPs) throughout the state. Ranching and hunting are core to the Texas culture and lifestyle, and aerial wildlife management efficiently supports that, while also supporting native and exotic conservation efforts.

Although exotic captures are year-round, the deer capture season is only a few weeks long. Time limited, every day of the season is booked out sometimes a full year in advance. That means there are no days off, and every day is a long one.

Hide and seek

A capture day starts long before sunrise with breakfast at Chile Bandera’s, a local staple that’s open every day at 4 a.m. It’s packed when we arrive, trailered helicopters taking up a fair chunk of the parking lot. It’s a waste of money to fly to the capture ranches, so the trailers have everything they need, including fuel. Once those R44s start up for the day, they don’t shut down until the job’s done, hot fueling about every hour to keep weight low and maneuverability high.

We convoy an hour south, down lonesome Texas roads lit only by headlights and flares from the occasional oil derrick, reminders that this land once made folks overnight millionaires. These deer programs, which sometimes ultimately lead to hunting, are intended to diversify the genetic makeup of the ranch, and breed for appealing traits such as antlers and size. A handsome buck means a more stunning trophy, and that the ranch can charge more for that high-fence hunt. DMP rules allow one buck and 20 does per pen for a breeding season, and this morning, the aim is to fill two pens, catching 42 deer total.

The bucks are always the first captures. As is typical of the animal kingdom, bucks are fragile and captures later in the day are more likely to stress them. And we aren’t looking for any old buck. The ranch owner or DMP manager chooses, either through game cameras, survey, or otherwise, which bucks they want.

Today we’ll have two R44s and a pair of side-by-sides on the ground. Shooter Steven Hille will join Justin in his front left seat, and Joseph will have Tate Yow in his to hop out and tie up deer—three hooves bound, one free—when needed. On the ground we’ll have the rest of the crew. Meyer, as a long-standing rule, never allows two helicopters to capture at the same time on the same ranch—the collision risk is too great, so his helicopter will be in primarily a supporting role.

Just as the sun rises, the search is on. The team knows what buck we’re looking for first based on its antler pattern—“split G2s with kickers.” Finding any deer below us on this overcast day where the chaparral seems to blend with the flat shadows of any wildlife is challenging—finding one specific deer seems like a needle in the haystack.

I’ve seen videos of captures before but seeing it in person is something else. From a distance, it looks like a Hollywood stunt version of a helicopter crashing—but with more attention the deliberate precision becomes clear. This particular ranch is one Meyer and team know well, and they know where the power line wires are, so the limits to maneuverability are just the limits of the team’s own skill. Once someone spots a deer, the helicopter turns into a predator, completely locked onto the target, Justin manipulating power and controls to fly just above the trees, closely contouring the vegetation, making aggressively tight turns, nose down like a bird of prey about to strike, a moon orbiting the target’s gravitational pull. The net creates so much drag that the shooter only has about a 20-foot range, and that’s when the wind is in his favor. They must get mighty close to even have a good chance of hitting the target—and these boys don’t like to miss. Feet from the ground, and as Meyer puts it, “living in the dead man’s curve” of power, chasing a wild animal, sometimes while the rancher watches them work and sees that clock run, there is no room—literally none—for error.

The team finds the first buck and captures it, releasing it to the pen where the ranch owner and friends snap a quick picture—these days are a big deal to everyone. After the second buck is caught, things pick up. Find a deer, chase the deer, net the deer. Tie the deer, move the deer by ground or external load. Refuel and repeat. When it really gets fun to watch is when there are back-to-back-to-back captures, which feels like watching a series of triple plays in the ballpark.

Sometimes it takes a minute from spotting the deer to capturing it, sometimes it takes five, and sometimes there are lulls in even spotting one that makes the time seem to stretch forever. But no matter how long it takes, the flying intensity never lowers, and the team is constantly operating in that area at the limit of one’s skill and the helicopter’s capability.

Back at basecamp with the trailers the youngest Meyer son, Jacob, is on net duty. Jacob shows me how the weights are checked for size and damage, the nets detangled and cleaned of branches, then laid out, weights reattached, and finally, packed, an all-day, meticulous process.

A counter attached to the instrument panel next to a GPS that Meyer guesses has never been turned on keeps track of how many deer they’ve caught, and around noon, the job’s complete. It is already a nine-hour day. Joseph peels off to go help move some cattle, and we follow Justin and crew to ranch number two. The afternoon brings another facet of Flying J to the forefront—exotics capture. Today, they’ll tranquilize 10 addax (white antelope), and carefully transport them to wildlife broker Micah Frerich, who will then trailer the animals directly to their new home a few hours away. These stunning animals are native to the Sahara, and with horns rather than antlers, must be treated with extra care since horns, once broken, do not grow back. The team makes quick work of it.

It doesn’t show in the precision flying, at least not from the ground, but these long days of the short deer season add up. Later, Joseph tells us it hasn’t been unusual for days to start before 4 a.m. and end after 9 p.m., especially after working on ranches farther out or when they have maintenance to take care of.

“The best way I can describe it is when I watch someone like Justin or a new pilot or somebody new that hasn’t done a lot of it. They go do a six- or eight-hour job. They look like they ran a marathon.”

But even with years of experience, no one is immune from the accumulation of long days.

“It is tiring,” says Meyer. “We’re a month into it. We’ve got a week or two left.”

“I’m spent a little bit,” he says, the tiredness clear in his eyes after we head back to Jourdanton.

The physical fatigue, while extreme, is secondary to the mental toll.

“Your mind is literally everything. It’s a very mental-drained job. You got to keep your head on your shoulders.” Justin says the only way he gets through a season is with caffeine; doctor’s orders stop Joe from too much coffee, though, and he desperately misses it.

No rest for the wicked, because tomorrow is another day and the season waits for no one.

Ride along

Today Flying J has two ranches on the schedule, so Justin and Meyer split up, and we follow Meyer’s team south after another early wakeup and to-go Chile B’s. This ranch is farther away, down the gravel offshoot of a farm to market road about halfway between Jourdanton and Laredo, where the crew will capture for one pen (21 deer in total). At the crew house where we park our cars and the trailer, a buck walks by, watching us, and a handful of does wander around after the buck vanishes into the brush.

These sightings turn out to be a tease, and the morning proves the unpredictability of the job, because when you’re dealing with wildlife, you’re at nature’s mercy. The deer today, especially the buck in the morning, are clever and recalcitrant, evading capture every turn and making the day longer than typical for one pen.

But after capturing the buck, things get rolling, and with the extra time, I get to ride along on a capture. It is so cool. Chasing a deer down just above the tree tops, turning on a dime, watching Meyer keep the rotor loaded to avoid the dreaded low-G pushover, whipping around with the smell of mesquite and animal coming into the helicopter’s open doors, coordinating with the team on the ground, hopping in and out of the helicopter, the pop of the net getting shot off, the ground crew racing over to tie the deer up before it can run away—it’s just cool. Airplanes simply can’t move through 3-D space like this, and getting a taste of this thrilling maneuverability is delicious. Increasingly covetous of that front right seat and this beautiful dance of precision flying, I hop back out after a couple captures and with that, the day wraps. Justin says he knows they fly mostly outside the envelope, and it’s true that this flying is about as far away from the docile regimes of a typical R44 as possible. Getting into this business isn’t for everyone, and it requires a certain love of the game. Meyer says with a new pilot, he’ll let them start capturing animals around 500 hours and spraying around 1,000 hours. Operating beyond the envelope is a necessity to get the job done, but it isn’t without its risks. Justin “balled one up” on a cattle mission in his early days when an unnoticed wire across a road hooked the tail rotor. He doesn’t remember it and it obviously didn’t stop him, but the risks are there, and all these low-altitude operators know that.

So, are they the real flying cowboys? Justin says absolutely not—they’re way more efficient, and he doesn’t think he’s ever seen his dad ride a horse.

“They did a study,” says Justin, “that it would take three weeks with I think it was like seven cowboys on horseback to work the same amount of cattle that we can do in like two days, with one or two helicopters.”

“I’ve worked thousands of cattle in a day by myself,” says Justin. “No cowboys.”

Meyer’s flying less now and Justin more, and they’re planning to train A&P and shooter Zach as a pilot soon, too, but Meyer has no plans to stop.

“It’s one of those addictions,” he says, something he’s hungered for ever since that first catch he saw years ago. “I loved it ever since.”

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